Latest in Comments on Science and Academia

  • Editorial Quality at Elsevier

    Editorial Quality at Elsevier

    If you ever wondered about editorial quality at Elsevier, look no further. Original here and in case it gets fixed, on the Web Archive here, and finally the PDF.

  • Another unintended benefit of chat AIs

    Another unintended benefit of chat AIs

    Professors always hope for crisp, clear, and correct answers from students in response to questions. Often, we get wishy-washy answers that make us despair. This gets particularly bad when asking for a term definition. For example, I might ask: “What is a for loop in computer programming?” hoping for something like “A for loop is…

  • Writing recommendation letters using a chat AI

    Writing recommendation letters using a chat AI

    It is the first week of the new year, and I already got three student requests for recommendation letters. Writing recommendation letters is an important duty of a professor, but writing letters for students who took exactly one course with with me ten years ago is stretching this duty. Thankfully, chat AIs can help–or can…

  • How to extend the authorship list of a research article

    How to extend the authorship list of a research article

    Let’s assume you are a scientist, collaborating with another scientist on some research project that will lead to exactly one article (to keep things simple). How should you go about involving further scientists, perhaps to perform even stronger research? The answer is simple, if you work from first principles. Here there are the two key…

  • When there is no alternative to inner source [Upcoming talk]

    When there is no alternative to inner source [Upcoming talk]

    I’ve been settling on this talk to motivate our inner source work; I will be holding it a couple of times over the coming year, most notably first at the upcoming Inner Source Summit 2023. Title: When there is no alternative to inner source Abstract: Sometimes, there is no alternative to using inner-source software development. In this talk, I look at the…

  • Upcoming talks in 2023 Q4

    Upcoming talks in 2023 Q4

    I’m happy to report about my upcoming presentations in the fourth quarter of 2023. I may be adding more talks to this list as last minute confirmations come in.